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The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024 was awarded jointly to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun "for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation"
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 386 posts.
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The Myth of Bananaland
The marketing and reality of the United Fruit Company
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The purge of German science in 1933
“If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!” — Adolf Hilter
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Plan 9 is a uniquely complete operating system
A large contributor to the "feel" of an Operating System comes from the software it chooses to include by default. There are entire linux distributions that differentiate themselves just based on the default configured software. There is room for so many options of base software because there are in general many…
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Neo Geo Architecture: A practical analysis
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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The Heart of Unix (2018)
Despite all of its warts, I like working in Linux. I've used it for 15 years and I've never been as productive in another environment. Most people claim that it's the configurability of Linux that keep the users coming. That may have attracted me at first, but what attracts me now is its programmability.
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The Invention of Zero
“If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it and you will see the world.”
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Building the Bell System
If someone was making a list of the most important American companies today, it’s unlikely AT&T would be anywhere near the top.
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Descent: A classic 3-D first-person shooter (2012)
DESCENT is a classic 3-D first-person shooter for DOS that was released in 1995, developed by Parallax Software and published by Interplay Productions. DESCENT is a contemporary of the other very popular FPS of the time, DOOM by id Software, released just over a year before. However, it is not based on DOOM; the…
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The Star Destroyer and Imperial Military Doctrine
Fireside this week! Next week, with luck, I’ll have my ‘On the Reign of Alexander III of Macedon’ up as an addendum to our discussion of Hellenistic armies. But in the meantime, i…
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Francis Ford Coppola's “Godfather Notebook”
"IF FOUND--Please return to Paramount Pictures"
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How Miles Davis hired John Coltrane
A fascinating interlude from James Kaplan's new book '3 Shades of Blue'
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Atari Falcon030
Impressive, but too late to the party
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A History of Source Control Systems: SCCS and RCS
dsp's personal site
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How DOS was able to use most of the 1 MB address space of the 8086
A tour on how DOS was able to use most of the 1 MB address space of the 8086
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After 41 years, my first assembly program on my first computer, the Tomy Tutor
We got it in 1983, I think, so it only took me about 41 years to get around to it. This Tomy Tutor isn't a replacement system I secondarily ...
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The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer (2001)
Some time later, I came across Iavor�s "jokes" page, including a funny bit called � The Evolution of a Programmer � in which the traditional imperative "Hello, world" program is developed through several variations, from simple beginnings to a ridiculously complex extreme. A moment�s thought turned up the factorial…
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Converting a Cisco 7609 into a beer tap (2021)
Last year I thought that we had reached some sort of peak in terms of how far one can go in building useless things by converting a 42U rack into a
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Urban renewal left the U.S. too scared to build
The destructive nature of urban renewal left the U.S. too scared to build anything at scale ever again.
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You Too Could Have Made Curl
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCJmAyUr1j4 This is the video recording of my talk with this title, done at February 4, 2024 10:00 in the K1.105 room at FOSDEM 2024. The room can hold some 800 people but there were a few hundred seats still unoccupied. Several people I met up with later have insisted that 10 am on a ……
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The Battle Line at Louvain
“Where they burn books, they will also burn people” — Heinrich Heine
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UTC, Tai, and Unix Time (2001)
TAI times are identified by year, month, day, hour, minute, and second. There are exactly 86400 TAI seconds in every TAI day. TAI days are labelled by the Gregorian calendar.
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30cm worm fossil more than half a billion years old discovered in Greenland
Fossils of a new group of animal predators have been located in the Early Cambrian Sirius Passet fossil locality in North Greenland. These large worms may be some of the earliest carnivorous animals to have colonised the water column more than 518 million years ago, revealing a past dynasty of predators that…